Managed IT vs Hourly: A Lubbock Buyer's Guide

Most small businesses in Lubbock buy IT one of two ways: pay a guy by the hour when something breaks, or pay a flat monthly fee for a managed plan. Both can be the right call. The question is which one fits your situation.

This post is the conversation we have with prospects who walk in the door already wondering. No bias, no upsell. The math is the math.

What hourly costs

The list price for IT engineering in West Texas in 2026 is $150 to $250 an hour, depending on whether you want the kid who fixes Wi-Fi or the engineer who can recover a domain controller. We don’t sell open-ended hourly engineering anymore. Support is a monthly plan, and projects get a flat-rate quote.

For a 10-person office, “occasional IT” usually runs 8 to 20 hours a month once you account for:

• The two-hour printer issue every quarter.
• The one-hour Wi-Fi issue every month.
• The four-hour “we changed ISPs and now nothing works” event once a year.
• The new-hire onboarding.
• The departing-staff offboarding.
• The Microsoft 365 license question.
• The “can you check on the backup” request.
• The actual emergencies.

At 12 hours a month and $200 an hour, that’s $2,400 per month. And that is only the labor. You still pay separately for email, the phone bill, and whatever antivirus someone installed.

For comparison, our Office plan for a 10-person office is $249 per person, so $2,490 a month. That covers unlimited remote support, monitoring and patching, our security tools, a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 Business Standard license, a desk phone that rings, network and firewall management, and on-site service in our service area.

The labor alone is close to the same number. Office puts the licenses and the phones inside it.

When hourly makes sense anyway

There are three legitimate cases for staying hourly:

You are very small and very simple. A two-person consultancy on Microsoft 365 with no server, no on-site infrastructure, and no compliance exposure may genuinely have less than two hours of IT issues a month. The math doesn’t work for a managed plan.

You have an internal IT person and just need overflow. If you employ someone who handles 90% of incoming work and you only need an outside engineer for project work, you should hire engineering by the hour, not subscribe.

You actively want unpredictable expense. Some businesses prefer expense to cost. Hourly fits.

If you don’t fit one of those three, you are probably overpaying for hourly.

What managed IT buys you

A real managed plan is not just “they fix things faster.” The structural pieces, in roughly the order they matter:

1. The relationship is proactive, not reactive

Hourly IT is paid to fix what’s broken. Managed IT is paid to prevent things from breaking. The incentives line up differently. A managed provider who lets your machines stay unpatched is creating their own problem, because they have to fix the breach.

2. You get monitoring you couldn’t afford à la carte

Real RMM (remote monitoring and management) plus endpoint protection plus a NOC plus patch management costs more than the smallest managed plans. Bundled, it’s commodity. Bought separately, it’s $50 to $150 a user.

3. Your invoice is predictable

A working business needs to know what IT costs next month. With hourly, you don’t.

4. The relationship deepens over time

The provider learns your environment. Your one-line email “the printer is doing the thing again” gets fixed without an hour of figuring out which printer.

5. We already know your setup

Hourly engineers come when they can, and they start from scratch every time. On a plan, your machines are already monitored and documented, so we start from what we know.

Choosing a plan

Once you decide a monthly plan beats hourly for your situation, the next question is which plan. We have three, and an hourly option:

• Hourly ($200 an hour, $349 after hours, 1-hour minimum, card on file). No plan and no contract. Fine if you need us a few times a year. Nothing is monitored or patched between calls, and plan customers go first.
• Support ($99 per computer per month, no minimum). Unlimited remote support, monitoring, patching, and managed antivirus. On-site is $100 an hour with a 1-hour minimum, half the hourly rate.
• Office ($249 per person per month from four people; $499 for one person, $349 each for two, $299 each for three). This is the main plan. Everything in Support, plus our security tools, backup with a tested restore every month, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 paid for and run by us, a desk phone that rings, network and firewall management, vendor calls, and on-site service in our service area.
• AI + ERP ($499 per person per month from four people; $749 for one person, $599 each for two, $549 each for three). Everything in Office, plus an AI agent for each person, set up for their job, with training. It drafts the email, the call notes, and the follow-ups, and never sends anything on its own. Zoho One is paid for and set up by us.

Support has no contract. Office is a 6-month commitment and AI + ERP is 12, and setup is free. Or pay for setup (one month of Office, two months of AI + ERP) and go month-to-month.

Projects and websites are not part of any plan. Those get a flat-rate quote.

A useful gut check: if you’re paying more than $990 a month in hourly IT bills as a 10-person business, and paying for email and phones on top of that, Office is probably the better deal.

The decision tree we use

When a prospect calls, the conversation runs like this:

• Do you want one number for the office, with email, phones, and security handled? → Office.
• Do you also want us to supply the computers? → That is a quote, not a plan.
• Do you already have email and phones you like, and mostly need someone to keep the computers running? → Support.
• Do you have an internal IT person who handles day-to-day? → You may not need a plan. Call us about the project in front of you.

That covers most of the calls we get.

The free way to find out

The free Cyber Score is the two-minute version. It grades what an attacker can see about your domain from outside and emails you a written report. If you want a real recommendation rather than a guess, we offer a free IT Blueprint Assessment. A real engineer walks your office, looks at every system, leaves you with a written punch list and a flat-rate proposal. And we buy you (the decision-maker) lunch. You keep the document either way. No obligation.

That’s the offer. It’s the same one we make to everyone, and it’s the right starting point regardless of which plan you eventually pick.